Before there were coins, before there
were Spanish Treasure Fleets, and even
before there were any kind of colonies
in the Spanish Main, the conquistador
Hernán Cortés and his men discovered
treasure in the form of native-American
gold and silver artifacts. While it is a
shame that these artifacts no longer
exist, at least their one-time presence
is confirmed by what have become known
as "tumbaga" bars: a group of over 200
silver and gold ingots discovered in the
remains of an unidentified ca.-1528
shipwreck off Grand Bahama Island. The
artifacts that composed these bars were
apparently lumped together in two
piles—one for gold-colored artifacts and
the other for silver-colored
artifacts—with great amounts of
impurities (predominantly copper) in
each pile. The piles were then melted as
much as possible (not thoroughly) and
poured into crude molds that in some
cases were no more than depressions in
the sand. The resulting ingots, called "tumbaga"
bars, were then stamped with four types
of markings:

1. Assayer, many in the form of BV with
"~" over the B and "o" over the V,
possibly signifying Bernardino Vasquez,
one of Cortés' fellow conquistadors.

2. Fineness, marked in Roman numerals as
a percentage of 2400.

3. Serial number, usually in the form of
the letter R followed by Roman numerals.

In 1995 we had the great fortune to be
offered 133 silver bars from this wreck,
which divers had excavated in 1992.
These 133 silver bars represented a
corner on the market, as the rest of the
bars found (including all the gold bars)
were either sold at auction or doled out
to company officials and contractors
well before we made our large purchase.

Each bar is described in detail in the
1993 book Tumbaga Silver for Emperor
Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, by
Douglas Armstrong, a professional
conservator hired by the salvage company
to clean and preserve all the silver "tumbaga"
bars.